Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

History Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 17 of 17

Full-Text Articles in History

Enlightenment Science And Nano-Science: Creating Order Out Of Magic, Elizabeth Ramsey Frey Jan 2013

Enlightenment Science And Nano-Science: Creating Order Out Of Magic, Elizabeth Ramsey Frey

Honors Theses

People today live in a world dominated by technology. All of the conveniences and technologies people enjoy and utilize today, however, would not exist without the foundation of empirical science laid during the Enlightenment. This thesis looks at the Enlightenment both as a philosophical movement and as the setting of the Scientific Revolution. The leaders of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution began the tradition of utilizing reason in research, founded empirical science, and developed the scientific method. This thesis traces the development of science during the Enlightenment and seeks to prove that Enlightenment science set the stage for the science …


There Is A Gnawing Worm Under The Bark Of Our Tree Of Liberty: Anti-Mission Baptists, Religious Liberty, And Local Church Autonomy, John Lindbeck Jan 2013

There Is A Gnawing Worm Under The Bark Of Our Tree Of Liberty: Anti-Mission Baptists, Religious Liberty, And Local Church Autonomy, John Lindbeck

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The schism between American missionary and anti-mission Baptists of the 1820s and 1830s stemmed from an ideological disagreement about how Baptists should interact with the rest of society. While anti-mission Baptists maintained their distance from "worldly" non-Baptist society, missionary Baptists attempted to convert and transform "the world." Anti-mission Baptists feared that large-scale missionary and benevolent societies would slowly accumulate money and influence, and that they would use that influence to infringe on the autonomy of local congregations and the religious liberty of the nation. While histories of this topic often portray anti-mission Baptists as obscure and paranoid of an imagined …


The Fearful State Of England: The Amalgamation Of Fin-De-Siècle Anxieties And Anarchist Outrages In The Public Deconstruction Of The Liberal State, 1892-1911, David R. Speicher Jan 2013

The Fearful State Of England: The Amalgamation Of Fin-De-Siècle Anxieties And Anarchist Outrages In The Public Deconstruction Of The Liberal State, 1892-1911, David R. Speicher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes a series of Anarchist crimes, occurring in England from 1892-1911, and concentrates on the public dialogue that emerged in the popular press as a result of these crimes. British newspapers and periodicals published extensively on the crimes, and the crimes became a way for the British public to discuss wide-ranging topics, such as liberalism, labor, immigration, poverty and national degeneration. Many Britons believed that these crimes had revealed an Anarchist danger hidden within England, and, as a result, many Englanders perceived Britain's social and political customs to be outdated and unsafe. These crimes occurred at a time …


I Won't Be Reconstructed: Good Old Rebels, Civil War Memory, And Popular Song, Joseph Melvin Thompson Jan 2013

I Won't Be Reconstructed: Good Old Rebels, Civil War Memory, And Popular Song, Joseph Melvin Thompson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following thesis traces the life of a song generally known as “I'm a Good Old Rebel” to explore the impact of popular culture on the creation of Civil War memory. Penned in the aftermath of Lee's surrender and containing lines like, “I hate the Yankee Nation / And everything they do; / I hate the Declaration / Of Independence, too,” the “Good Old Rebel” typifies a certain brand of white southern identity that refuses Confederate defeat and sounds a call to arms for continued rebellion against the federal government. To begin, this study creates a biographical sketch of the …


John Brown, Martyer For The Cause Of The Blacks: John Brown, The Haitian Revolution, And The Death Of American Slavery, Wes Trueblood Jan 2013

John Brown, Martyer For The Cause Of The Blacks: John Brown, The Haitian Revolution, And The Death Of American Slavery, Wes Trueblood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Haitian Revolution changed John Brown to a degree not recognized by scholars. Brown lived in an America largely shaped by the revolt, and it is no surprise that it shaped him as well. While preoccupied with debt, Brown did not consider the Haitian Revolution at length. Released from debt in 1842, however, Brown began reflecting on the revolt and, consequently, on his pacifism. Brown could not reconcile the two. Less than five years after his insolvency Brown had abandoned pacifism, and, in 1847, he revealed to Frederick Douglass that he planned to employ the bloody lessons of the Haitian …


Prairie, Property, And Promise: Black Migrants And Farmers In Kansas, 1860-1885, Keith Dennis Mccall Jan 2013

Prairie, Property, And Promise: Black Migrants And Farmers In Kansas, 1860-1885, Keith Dennis Mccall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Black migrants transformed Kansas in the 1860s and 1870s. This thesis focuses on Franklin County, Kansas, as an unit of analysis that is demographically and geographically representative of the black migrant experience in the state between 1860 and 1885. This work demonstrates that black migrants gained a secure economic footing in the county by helping to develop prairie into productive farms. Their agricultural labors turned grassland into fertile fields, and their crop yields aided in attracting agriculturally-related industries to the region. As successful farmers who accumulated wealth and property, black migrants created a social space for themselves in Kansas. They …


Recipes Exist In The Moment: Cookbooks And Culture In The Post-Civil War South, Kelsielynn Ruff Jan 2013

Recipes Exist In The Moment: Cookbooks And Culture In The Post-Civil War South, Kelsielynn Ruff

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cookbooks manifested Southern archetypes between the late 1860s and the early 2000s. From the late 1800s through 1945, cookbooks exemplified Jim Crow with racist language, stereotyped illustrations, and marginalization of black laborers. Almost at the same time, an ideological belief that glorified the South's loss in the Civil War and romanticized the leaders and fallen soldiers as heroes, called the Lost Cause, appeared in cookbooks. Whites used reminiscence about antebellum society, memorialization of Civil War heroes, and coded language to support Lost Cause beliefs. As the twentieth century progressed, the racial tensions morphed, and the civil rights movement came to …


Christ And Class: The Protestant Episcopal Church In The South, 1760-1865, Ryan Lee Fletcher Jan 2013

Christ And Class: The Protestant Episcopal Church In The South, 1760-1865, Ryan Lee Fletcher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Christ and Class: The Protestant Episcopal Church in the South, 1760-1865 Ryan Lee Fletcher This dissertation examines the emergence, practices, religious culture, expansion, and social role of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the American South from 1760 to 1865. The dissertation employs three major research methodologies by: (1) centralizing the role of social class in the Episcopal Church's history, (2) seriously considering the Episcopal Church's distinctive theology, and (3) quantifying the connections that linked the Episcopal Church to the South's economic structures. Archival research, periodicals, and published records related to the Protestant Episcopal Church provided the primary evidence used in …


Grounding The Counterculture: Post-Modernism, The Back-To-The-Land Movement, And Authentic Enviroments Of Memory, Jonathan Bowdler Jan 2013

Grounding The Counterculture: Post-Modernism, The Back-To-The-Land Movement, And Authentic Enviroments Of Memory, Jonathan Bowdler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will explore the regional and cultural dimensions of the Back-to-the-Land movement during the 1970s in an effort to move scholarship away from applying theoretical constructs such as post-modernism to diverse social movements. By drawing on the three main Back-to-the-Land publications, namely the Whole Earth Catalog, Mother Earth News, and the Foxfire books, this paper will demonstrate the varying impulses and regional nuances of the movement as well as the continuity and discontinuity of the back-to-nature tradition in America. Particular emphasis will be placed on the ways in which the Southern homesteading experience has been masked within the scholarship …


Plain Folk Recovered: Class, Property And Agriculture In Lawrence County, Alabama, 1850-1860, Joseph Thomas Richardson Jan 2013

Plain Folk Recovered: Class, Property And Agriculture In Lawrence County, Alabama, 1850-1860, Joseph Thomas Richardson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the population and economy of farmers in Lawrence County, a county in northern Alabama, in the decade between 1850 and 1860. It uses the manuscript schedules of the United States census and statistical analysis aided by a computer database to determine landownership and bring a focus to the class of landowning yeoman farmers on the border between two physiographic regions: the Tennessee Valley, where land and resources were largely dominated by large planters, and the hill country in the south of the county, where yeomen enjoyed access to open land and opportunity for economic advancement. It shows …


The Rule Of Three: Federal Courts And Prison Farms In The Post-Segregation South, Gregory Louis Richard Jan 2013

The Rule Of Three: Federal Courts And Prison Farms In The Post-Segregation South, Gregory Louis Richard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following dissertation discusses the United States Federal Court judicial reform of prison farms in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. More specifically, it examines the judicial and legislative history of the historic reform that includes the role of the individual judges that presided over the years of legislation necessary to bring Constitutional reforms to the state prison systems of the South. The judges and states in this study include J. Henley Smith of Arkansas, William C. Keady of Mississippi, and E. Gordon West of Louisiana. The research outlines an important aspect of the court system and the struggle between states and …


Slavery, Secession, And Sin: Religion And Dissent In The Upcountry South, 1820-1865, Douglas R. Porter Jan 2013

Slavery, Secession, And Sin: Religion And Dissent In The Upcountry South, 1820-1865, Douglas R. Porter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Despite decades of scholarship illuminating divisions within Southern society during the nineteenth century, religious historians still imply that white Southerners collectively supported slavery, secession, and the Confederate war effort, choices they believed to be inherently just and holy. This dissertation challenges this notion by highlighting religious dissent in the South during the antebellum and Civil War eras. It argues that antislavery and anti-Confederate white Southerners imagined their lives and times, and justified their social and political choices, with as much religious urgency as their proslavery and pro-Confederate neighbors. Recognizing Protestant diversity rather than evangelical uniformity, this study insists that there …


Creek Corridors Of Commerce: Converging Empires, Cultural Arbitration, And The Recourse Of Gulf Coast Trade, Kevin T. Harrell Jan 2013

Creek Corridors Of Commerce: Converging Empires, Cultural Arbitration, And The Recourse Of Gulf Coast Trade, Kevin T. Harrell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract: this dissertation seeks to interpret how the upper creeks used geographic corridors (i.e. rivers and overland paths) to the Gulf of Mexico to offset economic and military dominance from Carolina and Georgia during the eighteenth century. Not only did access to these channels assure their commercial and territorial integrity through the colonial and postcolonial periods, but they also facilitated and empowered specific lineages and factions among the creeks in general. These special interest groups presented a confusing array of political alignment and counter-alignment that permitted the creeks avenues to challenge the coercive effects of outside markets. This is not …


Revolutionary-Era Republicanism As Championed By Nathaniel Macon And John Randolph Of Roanoke, Barbara Hensley Shepard Jan 2013

Revolutionary-Era Republicanism As Championed By Nathaniel Macon And John Randolph Of Roanoke, Barbara Hensley Shepard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work concentrates on the formation of a uniquely American version of republicanism and two men who staunchly adhered to its tenets long after it had fallen out of fashion. Revolutionary-era republican provided a useful set of principles for the colonists of British North America as they moved toward independence, throughout the Revolutionary War and into the nineteenth century. This work attempts to show the roots of American republicanism and how during the first decades of the nineteenth century the concept was adopted and adapted by those in the government. Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina and the Virginian, John Randolph …


Shaking Reconstructed Apples From Secessionist Trees: Beyond Ordinances Of Secession And Civil War, Audrey Michele Uffner Jan 2013

Shaking Reconstructed Apples From Secessionist Trees: Beyond Ordinances Of Secession And Civil War, Audrey Michele Uffner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a social, political, and cultural biography of Mississippi's secessionist generation, exploring the full arc of their lives over the course of the nineteenth century and the role of secession throughout their political careers. The life course of three Mississippians, James Lusk Alcorn, Jefferson Davis, and Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, placed in the broad context of the larger Nineteenth Century, reveals that secessionists and the secession movement have a power and significance beyond traditional historiographic interpretations and periodization. Antebellum institutions and organizations tied southern men together, providing them with space and opportunity to imagine and create an alternative …


Neither Slave Nor Free... : Interracial Ecclesiastical Interaction In Presbyterian Mission Churches From South Carolina To Mississippi, 1818-1877., Otis Westbrook Pickett Jan 2013

Neither Slave Nor Free... : Interracial Ecclesiastical Interaction In Presbyterian Mission Churches From South Carolina To Mississippi, 1818-1877., Otis Westbrook Pickett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research focuses on the efforts of a variety of missionary agencies, organizations, Presbyteries, synods and congregations who pursued domestic missionary efforts and established mission churches among enslaved Africans and Native Americans from South Carolina to Mississippi from 1818-1877. The dissertation begins with a historiographical overview of southern religion among whites, enslaved Africans and Native Americans. It then follows the work of the Rev. Cyrus Kingsbury among the Choctaw, the Rev. T.C. Stuart among the Chickasaw, the Rev. Charles Colcock Jones among enslaved Africans in Georgia and investigates the work of the Rev. John Adger and John Lafayette Girardeau among …


The Sinaloa Drug Cartel: A Clear And Present Danger, Connor Anthony Hagan Jan 2013

The Sinaloa Drug Cartel: A Clear And Present Danger, Connor Anthony Hagan

Honors Theses

The Sinaloa drug cartel of Mexico poses perhaps the greatest threat to the citizens of the United States of America. The history of this organization, an analysis of its leaders and its current methods of operating, offer a clearer picture of its decision-making power structure. The two-branched structure that the Sinaloa cartel utilizes includes compartmentalization and extensive corruption within and outside of Mexico. This thesis is meant to propose a framework to understand the Sinaloa cartel and point out areas in which the cartel both excels and fails. This thesis is also intended to assist law enforcement with background information …